Nicknames

‘Tramountanas’ - George North.

Generally credited as being the first Greek to migrate to South Australia in 1842, Georgios Tramountanas showed true pioneering spirit when he moved to the sparsely-populated Eyre Peninsula in the late 1850s.

According to documents held in the Adelaide office of the National Archives, in 1878, after more than 20 years spent farming near Elliston, George applied to become a naturalised settler in the Province of South Australia – but as George North, not Georgios Tramountanas. This seemingly unrelated choice of surname shows how difficult it can be to track Greek family history because of the tendency of both officials and migrants to anglicise names – ‘Tramountanas’ roughly translates as a Greek northerly wind.